


Awww, Budapest, No....

by pherryt



Series: Clint Barton Bingo [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Budapest, Clint helps, Heart to Hearts, Secrets, clint can't keep secrets, implied future tony/steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 12:26:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18468946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pherryt/pseuds/pherryt
Summary: Budapest was a bogeyman.No one knew what had happened in Budapest. All anyone knew for sure was that it was a highly classified mission both Natasha and Clint went on and that it nearly went belly up.That didn’t stop anyone from speculating of course.





	Awww, Budapest, No....

**Author's Note:**

> my very first square for the Clint Barton Bingo - the square was Budapest, picked at random by sundog-fl - thank you!!
> 
> i can't actually claim this is my first marvel fic, nor can i claim it's my first avengers fic. but it's close.  
> currently, most of my marvel fics have been crossovers with Power Pack (which nobody really knows) and i did write a coda to Infinity Wars but thats it, thats my Marvel (writing) experience.
> 
> btw, the Clint Barton bingo and any ensuing winterhawk fics i might make are all feathers-and-cigarettes fault. (Also, to note, the symbrock big bang i'm doing art for is also his fault) but he also beta'd this for me when i panicked that it didn't go the way i wanted to and i hated it and he assured me if i took one part out, it actually flowed really well and wasn't bad., even if it quite wasn't what i'd intended initially. so thanks!!
> 
> also - apologies for any typos - my keyboard is breaking down and i'm having to find workarounds for it...

Budapest was a bogeyman. 

No one knew what had happened in Budapest. All anyone knew for sure was that it was a highly classified mission both Natasha and Clint went on and that it nearly went belly up.

That didn’t stop anyone from speculating of course. Natasha just didn’t tell anyone if they got close. Neither did Clint.

Technically.

Currently, the briefing room was filling up with Avengers. Tony was playing with the screens, Bruce was fiddling with his glasses in a way that meant he hadn’t actually wanted to be here and Clint had walked in with a pot of coffee and a glare that said ‘hands off’.

Natasha pulled a chair out for him with a sigh before he could trip over it a nd he smiled at her gratefully over the lip of his pot.

“You planning on sharing  that with the class?” Tony asked Clint without even looking at him.

“You can get your own pot, you’re rich enough,” Clint grumbled, taking a swig from the pot in his hands.

“It’s my tower. That  _ is  _ my pot,” Tony pointed out.

“And I bet there’s more than one coffee pot in the building or that’s just poor planning,” Clint argued back.

Steve walked in, clapping his hands together sharply. “All right, all right, enough of the petty bickering – we’ve got a mission to discuss.”

Tony put his full attention on Steve, making  _ Captain America _ blush and Clint snickered into his pot. Natasha nudged him and gave him a warning look to behave. Clint decided he would… for now.

“So, what’s the mission, Steve?”

Figures it would be Natasha who would be brave enough to ask.

“Well, it won’t be anything like Budapest – “ Steve started to say, absently as it were, fumbling with Stark's computer to get the information to load on the screens till Tony took pity on Steve ad mumbled, “Give me that” and took away the remote.

Nearly instantly, the screens filled with pictures of tuxes and fancy dress and Clint caught the word ‘charity’ before he groaned and busied himself with his coffee while  Steve argued back, because of course he did. “I think I know what I’m doing, Tony. I’m not an idiot.”

“Never said you were, Cap. But if this mission is so all fired important, let’s just get the show on the road, all right? I can give you private computer lessons later.”

_ Heh, I bet he will _ , Clint thought with a smirk. He lifted his coffee pot and frowned.  _ Aww, coffee, no.  _ That hadn’t nearly been enough coffee to deal with this right now and, uh oh, why was Natasha looking at him like that?

He raised an eyebrow.

She glared.

The room had gone silent as everyone stared at their quiet interaction.

“Uh, guys? Anything we need to know?” Steve asked.

Natasha turned her glare on him and Clint had to give Steve credit. He didn’t wince or back down.

“What do  _ you  _ know about Budapest?”

Clint wanted to sink down in his seat.

“That… it’s… apparently just like the Battle of New York?” Steve prevaricated. Clint almost snorted but that would have drawn Natasha’s attention back to him. Steve was an awful liar.  _ Wonder if I can sneak out of here and get more coffee? _

He started to ease out of his seat and Natasha pinned him down with a glare. He grinned back at her and shifted like he’d never even thought of leaving even though he knew she wouldn’t fall for it.

Tony looked at Steve with a befuddled expression. “Actually, the point was it  _ wasn’t  _ anything like the Battle of New York.”

“Clint, do we have to have another talk about spying and top-secret missions and classified information?” Natasha crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at him disapprovingly in just that way she had when she was showing how disappointed she was in you.  _ Aw, Natasha, no… _

“C’mon, Nat, they’re the Avengers. If you can’t trust the Avengers, then who  _ can  _ you trust?”

She pointed at Tony. “How secure is the room?”

Tony pressed a button on his wrist. “Very. Why?”

“Guys, we don’t have time for this,” Steve protested. “This is very important.”

Natasha waved at him without looking. “Yeah, yeah. Charity, blah blah blah. We don’t need a mission debrief on how to dress up nice and schmooze.” She blinked, then reconsidered. “Okay, well,  _ most  _ of us don’t, anyway. I’ll make sure Clint cleans up nice. If I don’t murder him first for blabbing national secrets. Now spill.”

Steve shifted uncomfortably, pinned by the Black Widow’s gaze. 

“He, uh, after New York, I was ah… I guess you could say I was a wreck. Natasha, all those civilians we didn’t save…” Steve shook his head. “And I was having nightmares about them and all the people during the war that died because I didn’t get there in time.”

The room quieted as Steve talked, the agony clear in his voice, Tony gazing at him in mixed sympathy and horror and understanding, and Clint remembered that night, how he’d found Steve, how everyone had thought he was kinda invincible and hadn’t realized how much he was hurting inside. Clint had been desperate to do anything he could to help Steve. It wasn’t like Clint didn’t know what it was like.

“It was after one of those nightmares that Clint found me. We talked and I asked about Budapest – a way to distract myself. He didn’t mind. Instead, Clint explained that it was confidential, then proceeded to tell me about the time the two of you had been surrounded and outnumbered – just like New York, as far as I could tell – and how badly that had gone. I knew it was Budapest even though he’d denied it, just from all the details he left out.”

It had been bad, Clint remembered. Him and Nat against an unskilled army of mind-controlled civilians. How do you fight that? There’d been casualties, way too many for his liking, or Nat’s, but it wasn’t until they’d taken out the leader that things had gone back to normal. Still, the guilt had lived on in him, only mollified – however slightly – by the good they’d been able to do in the aftermath.

“He admitted to casualties, and I could see just from looking at him that the deaths haunted him just as they did me, and, god help me for saying this, it helped a little, to know I wasn’t alone in feeling that way.” Steve looked at him apologetically but Clint just waved a hand at him.

“It’s okay, Cap. It’s why I told you to begin with. Trust me, Nat and I, of all people, understand.”

“Thanks, Clint,” Steve said with some relief. Nat started to turn away, believing him to be done, but he spoke again, making everyone’s attention snap back to him. “Afterward, he talked about the reunions, how you and him stayed behind and helped families get back together, patched up their injuries. That there was one little girl that you’d saved in particular that had stuck in his mind… In the end, he couldn’t save everyone, but he’d made a difference to  _ them _ . And so did you. It was good to be reminded of our successes, even though it’s easy to get lost in our failures.”

Steve ended on a shaky breath and Tony reached for him, grabbing his hand and squeezing. Looking up, Steve sent Tony a shaky smile.

Clint stared at Nat, daring her to deny the good he’d done there, the necessity of it. She just blinked at him and turned to Tony. “Okay, your turn.”

Tony winced. “Not much to tell. Everything changed after New York. If I’m honest with myself – and I try not to be, it’s never been good - it changed a long time before that, when my best friend betrayed me, sold me out to terrorists and left me for dead.”

“Obadiah,” Steve said softly, and it was his turn to squeeze Tony’s hand.

“Yeah,” Tony agreed. “It’s kinda left me some trust issues and I’ve been… working through it, okay? But it’s not easy. And one night, Barton just showed up in my lab, poking into everything and knocking shit over – “

Clint snorted, because he remembered that. Remembered the painfully blank look on Tony’s face as he worked, so different from when he was truly immersed in his tinkering; a blank face Clint had seen in the mirror a few too many times. So he’d started messing around in the lab to distract Tony from whatever his thoughts had been, making a mess all the while chatting about the time he’d somehow become a dog magnet while on a mission and how difficult that had made things.

Soon, he’d had Tony roaring with laughter with all the dogs’ antics to keep up with him and how the dogs had completely blown his cover and Natasha had had to rescue _ him _ , and then the two of them had hugged as Tony cried on his shoulder, a bit of vulnerability that Clint had been surprised Tony had allowed him to see.

Clint shook his head to clear his thoughts, having missed most of what Tony had said, but tuning back in to the conversation just in time to hear Tony’s conclusion.

“ – Katniss over there doesn’t let anything get him down –“

_ Well, that wasn’t quite true _ , Clint thought, but he’d certainly worked at it over the years, helped in a lot of ways by Nat. 

“- because despite being an assassin and a spy, he still has trust, he still has faith in people, and he reminded me that I can have that again. That I don’t have to close myself off just because of one person.” Tony said that last bit while staring at Steve and Clint had to smother a grin.

Nat shook her head at Clint but the disapproving frown on her face was twitching slightly upwards. Anybody who didn’t know Nat wouldn’t see it, but Clint  _ did _ know Nat and he did. 

_ Victory. _ He held the smirk back with difficulty. Here she was judging him for spilling the beans on Budapest, but he actually  _ hadn’t  _ told anyone here anything he shouldn’t have, and she should have had more faith in him than that.

Last was Bruce who was in the process of cleaning his glasses, again, before sighing and putting them back on. 

“I hate myself, or, well, hated myself. I’m working on it,” Bruce said. “But I don’t suppose that comes as any surprise. But that part of me, the big guy? All that violence and rage? I  _ hate _ that that’s a part of me. That that’s  _ inside _ of me, okay? The Hulk, he… he’s  _ born  _ from that, that was already inside me before everything went wrong and I hate it.” 

The room went silent again, the tension thick as Bruce closed his eyes and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. Bruce had been the hardest to help. Clint hadn’t known what to say, but he’d done it quietly.

He’d admitted to the deep-seated rage he felt constantly bubbling beneath the surface, something he’d carried forward with him from childhood. It had taken a long time for him to accept that part of himself, to hone it and control it and put it to good use. People often underestimated Hawkeye, and he was okay with that, with them believing he was a bumbling idiot because, well, it wasn’t far from the truth, but when the need hit, he channeled that, using it to his benefit.

“When he told me about Budapest, he didn’t mention the dogs, or him getting kidnapped, or what the mission actually was. What he  _ did _ mention was that it had changed abruptly, from an intel gathering to an extraction, and it was only years of honed experience of channeling that anger into productive ways that saved the day.”

Taking a deep breath, Bruce continued. “From his example, I’ve been working ever since to not just channel that rage but to get in touch with that other part of me, to make peace with the Hulk so we can exist in harmony. Will I ever succeed? I don’t know, but Clint reminded me that we all have a little of the Hulk inside us. Mines just a little bigger than usual.”

“Well, I gotta hand it to you, Clint,” Nat said. “I hadn’t thought there was any way for you to talk about Budapest without sharing information you shouldn’t but you proved me wrong.”

“Oh ye of little faith.” This time, Clint allowed the smirk to spread over his face.

Though he was suddenly glad that Thor wasn’t there, because surely the God of Thunder would have let slip what Clint had told  _ him _ and it would take Nat less than 2 seconds to piece together that Clint had, after all, lied his fucking ass off.

And there was  _ no where _ on this planet he could hide from Natasha Romanov.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [rebloggable tumblr link ](https://pherryt.tumblr.com/post/184189532526/awww-budapest-no-marvel-canon-compliant)


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